When private equity giant Symphony Technology Group (STG) announced in January that it had split its McAfee Enterprise acquisition in two, combining all but the secure service edge (SSE) portfolio with FireEye to form Trellix, it promised that the SSE business would receive new branding at its launch “later this quarter”.
And just before the end of the said quarter, it has done so. Today marks the launch of Skyhigh Security.
The name will be familiar to many; in January 2018, McAfee acquired a cloud security company called Skyhigh Networks, whose technology is the underpinning of some of the McAfee Enterprise SSE offerings. The new company’s portfolio now includes Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Remote Browser Isolation technology, Cloud Firewall and Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP).
Credit: Business Wire.
“This is one of the reasons we chose [the name] Skyhigh,” said the company’s chief executive officer, Gee Rittenhouse, in an interview. “Initially, in 2018, when McAfee bought Skyhigh, it was, of course, Skyhigh Networks, and it was the leading CASB provider at the time. But since then, the portfolio has expanded to include a comprehensive security platform for that cloud edge. And so, while there’s a great deal of customer loyalty and recognition around the former company name of Skyhigh Networks, we thought it was important to represent the broader portfolio that we’ve developed over the last three or four years, and so expanded the name to Skyhigh Security.”
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While the new Skyhigh Security website is now live, he said that the actual product rebranding and associated changes to marketing materials and documentation and so forth will happen over the course of this calendar year. To minimize confusion, the company is even working with Gartner to adjust the company name in its latest Magic Quadrant, where McAfee Enterprise was named a Leader in SSE, and in its Critical Capabilities for SSE report.
However, for customers and partners, very little has changed.
“What we’ve done from a partner perspective, as well as from a customer perspective, is we haven’t changed any of the terms and conditions, the legal constructs, and things like that,” Rittenhouse explained. “So all of the back-end legal, price lists, partner portals, all of that remain the same, so it’s an experience that they know well – how to order, how to purchase things, and quote. So there’s no disruption from that perspective; the only thing that is changed is the logo and the name on that. And so with our partner enablement, and sales enablement, as we move the portfolio into this new branding, we will take our partners, as well as our own internal sales team down that road. But we tried to keep everything as consistent as we possibly could.”
He said Skyhigh will continue to invest in its current portfolio, which he thinks is in great shape, integrating the products to create a better user experience. One thing he does see happening is an increase in the number of control points, ensuring there is a consistent policy and visibility around data in cloud workloads, and that customers receive clear, actionable insights.
The company will also partner closely with its former siblings at Trellix.
“We have deep integrations with their technology,” Rittenhouse said. “All of our endpoint DLP is built into their endpoint framework. This gives us a huge market differentiator. We also share a lot of the same partners, same processes and things. I fully expect that the companies will have deep partnerships for quite some time. And I think by doing so it supports our customers, particularly around the use case of data loss protection.”
The pandemic and consequent growth of hybrid work has not only affected Skyhigh’s product roadmap to allow it to, for example, secure unmanaged devices, but has affected the way it does its own development.
“It’s created opportunities for our developers to work from anywhere,” he noted. “We now have access to labour markets that may have been prohibitive before, from a complexity perspective. And it’s expanded the portfolio to support these remote employees, to keep our critical and sensitive data protected.”
“It’s an exciting, exciting period. And we’re excited to take our customers along that journey, empowering their employees so that they can do the very best and be successful while being secure.”
